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Bring Back Personal Blogging
- smitty1e 4y agoI still have a personal blog. However, blogs were essentially a seminar where people could get caught up on topics that had escaped them elsewhere in their education. Now that one is caught up, there seems little to add.
- MrVandemar 4y agoAw go on, link it. I like looking at random blogs from HN contributers.
- superkuh 4y agoBlogs never went away. It's just that all the vast majority of the new web users, a number that completely overwhelmed the existing population, went straight into the walled gardens of megacorps. They still haven't become aware of the web at large (partly because web search sucks now). But their perceptions don't effect that the fact blog users and readers still exist. I think the real title of this article should be, "Introduce Personal Blogging to Smartphone Users".
- jseliger 4y agoRight: https://jakeseliger.com/ https://jakeseliger.com/ Anyone who wants to do personal blogging, can. There are few things with lower barriers to entry.
- Scoundreller 4y agoDoesn’t help that Google often de-ranks non-corporate content. They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it’s just the bigger players. If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. Even Wikipedia is toward the bottom of the page…
- superkuh 4y agoYep. My biggest peeve is that google never returns more than 400 search results now. Either you find it on the first 3-4 pages of 100 results or it stops and gives you no more. You can go 36 pages at 10 results per page but it's still only ever <400 results. It makes serendipitous web search and surfing nearly impossible and like you said, the first pages of results are stuffed with corporate sites and things that changed in the last week. Bing, btw, will only ever return <900 results.
- 082349872349872 4y agoare you aware of https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu ?
- jefftk 4y ago> If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. My expectation is that most people searching for the name of the bank are doing it because they are trying to find the official bank pages. If searches like [bankname fraud] etc also mostly got the bank's own pages, that would be a problem, but this sounds like giving people what they're looking for?
- wolpoli 4y agoI just did a Google search on a [big canadian bank with 4-letters fraud] and got all the bank's own pages. The bank created specialized pages for different fraud related scenarios, and they monopolized the first result page.
- ljm 4y agoI like what the indieweb community are trying to do to promote this, at least in principle. It couldn’t be easier to host a blog, whether static or through something like Wordpress or Ghost. But integration with native editors is pretty poor and writing a lengthy post into a blog’s hosted editor isn’t that nice if you already have a nice writing setup on, say, your iPad. So, things like Micropub and IndieAuth are interesting solutions to that problem, but the ecosystem isn’t quite there. But if it was, it’d be a nice way to manage a blog without requiring too much expertise.
- root_axis 4y agoExactly. What's more, the masses were driven by marketing budgets to the internet for megacorp internet products, they were never going to come online all on their own based on a motivation to read personal blogs.
- bnt 4y agoSo many tech sites call for boycott of Twitter (see Engadget) yet they actively post on Twitter to their massive audiences. Put your money where your mouth is and delete all your corporate Twitter accounts.
- theshrike79 4y agoI'd happily subscribe to mastodon.theverge.com just to avoid Twitter.
- aliqot 4y agoVerge was amazing, but slowly seemed to drift in the direction of being the Vice of tech news. I remember watching a "how to build a PC" video that I was convinced was parody but was actually serious.
- greesil 4y agoVergecast is both informative and entertaining.
- bnt 4y agoSo many great Youtubers were demonetized for making fun of that Verge PC build video.
- justindirose 4y agoI agree. The Verge used to be a top tier tech publication, but now many of their articles come across as unnecessarily angry to me — especially since their recent redesign.
- sourcecodeplz 4y agoI think blogs are great but social media should not be ignored. It is a great source of traffic for your blog. You CAN have it all. It's ok to have a facebook, twitter and instagram account. You are just giving up too much potential exposure for not participating in social media. It's nice to get comments on your blog, but people need to find it first. If you don't want/need/crave exposure, you could just use your blog as a personal space. One that you can look back to in 5-10 years, like a journal. Personally I use my blog to bookmark things that I find interesting (like a personal archive). Sometimes I don't just save the link to the site I want to bookmark, I copy-paste the whole contents of the page into my site (because the site could disappear). If you are worried about copyright et all, just make your blog private. Private blogs ARE A THING, if you didn't know.
- tjpnz 4y agoIt's perfectly possible to run a blog that isn't optimised for social media users or private. The kind of exposure I could get from those sites is also the kind I can do without, I don't think I'm alone in holding that belief either.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoI share when I write a new article but I don't have comments on my site for the reasons you mentioned. Too much negativity from places like Reddit, Twitter, HN is bad enough without having to moderate comments on your own site too.
- saperyton 4y agoI've found that a great way to discover new interesting blogs is the Thinking About Things newsletter [0]. They were on hiatus for a while but seem to be back now. I've gotten some great reads from them. [0] https://thinking-about-things.com https://thinking-about-things.com
- Finnucane 4y agoBloggers need to bring back blogrolls. When blogs ruled, bloggers would link to other blogs on the same topic or were otherwise of interest. A reader could hop from blog to blog endlessly.
- kaetemi 4y agoI still had one until 10 years ago, but those other blogs have since disappeared, and I've not done any effort on that part lately. I'm open to any offers to set up a little banner across blogs again though. Used to get them by just actually chatting with people online, but a platform to arrange blogroll matches could be neat.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alehlopeh 4y agoIt seems weird to accuse social media of killing the personal blog, especially by waxing nostalgic about the early web. You know what else didn’t exist back then? The Verge. Notably the author chose not to post this article on their personal blog.
- CodexArcana 4y agoYou're just accusing him of participating in the "society" he's looking to amend and improve which just dismisses his entire post. You could try engaging with the content intellectually. His points about owning your content down to where it's hosted is a valid message worth engaging with.
- marban 4y agoPlease stop whining about this non-issue — The tools are and have always been readily available for anyone willing to post a single letter on the Internet. The problem is that people apparently need an external trigger/confirmation/applause (aka like) now to do just that, whereas old-school blogging was more or less writing for yourself with the occasional random feedback in whatever form. Just lower your expectations and be prepared to give up your social currency in return for creative freedom.
- tayo42 4y agoIf your not looking for an audience why bother putting what you wrote online at all? Writing has a purpose, one of those is sharing an idea. If there's no one to share it with why would you write it then?
- bob1029 4y agoFeeling like someone could be watching is a motivating factor for many. If I had a sense that no one would ever find my blog, I might feel more discouraged than otherwise. In this new reality, I am more likely to jot down my notes in a private GitHub repository for future reference. For another example, look at Spotify. Granted, lots of horrible practices involved here, but the discovery aspect of the product is so good that many of us overlook those issues. I have found & purchased more music simply because of this discoverability. I win, the artists win, etc. Everyone tends to lose when the discovery mechanisms suck.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xigoi 4y agoSo you have something to link to when you're later arguing with someone and don't want to bother writing down your complex take on the topic.
- the-printer 4y agoSharing an idea and looking for an audience are not mutually dependent motives.
- JSavageOne 4y agoI agree with the sentiment of the title but this is a terrible article that doesn't go into any depth and adds nothing to the conversation. > The decline of Twitter What evidence is there that Twitter is declining? If anything it seems Twitter usage has increased under Musk. > (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block) How can someone talk about the need to bring back long-form content while simultaneously saying they'd block someone who writes long-form content? Doesn't make any sense to me. I've always thought the Twitter character limit was stupid as it eliminates the ability to write long form content on Twitter, and I'm happy Musk is finally going to eliminate this artificial restriction. There will always be a place for blogging, but the problem with it is lack of discoverability and conversation (sure you can add a comments section, but most people won't take the time to register for an account on your site just to write a comment on your blog post). Ultimately people write to get read, and social media gets more eyeballs. I don't think blogging will ever be more than a niche thing due to this lack of discoverability. Solve the discoverability aspect, and you've basically reinvented web 2.0 social media
- smetj 4y agoLets bring back link portals and webrings to cluster topics ...
- gigatexal 4y agoWhat Twitter and others solved with micro-blogging was discovery. There was nothing wrong with personal blogs. Sure, they had a bit more setup than just signing up for Twitter and typing out some 140-word screed but they were perfectly capable. Blogspot and others made it free, you needn't even have a domain and yet people still went to Twitter to build their "brand" (I hate that phrase) and get "discovered" and then get the sales funnel going to send "fans" (also gross) to their paid newsletters, podcasts, books, etc., all of it facilitated by the algorithm and Twitter.
- CodexArcana 4y agoSome kind of discovery protocol for blogs RSS feeds would be nice. Maybe BlueSky will fill that void. There probably are services already doing something like that, but it still puts a central authority in control of the discovery.
- gigatexal 4y agoYeah … RSS will likely play a huge role and for mass adoption or a large number of eyes it’ll need to be a centralized thing but then you get all the problems of centralization including the ability to say what can and can’t be part of the new discoverability index.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lapcat 4y agoBloggers were always a minority, because most people have little or nothing interesting to say. If you asked them to write a long essay on a subject, they just couldn't. This is why social media was a godsend to a lot of non-bloggers, because it made them feel that their 140/280 character sound bites were worth publishing on the web. These people can never "go back" to blogging, because they never did and never would write blogs. Setting that problem aside, another problem is that people have become accustomed/addicted to receiving links via social media rather than via RSS. This is a big problem for current/former bloggers who wish to leave social media. It's difficult to take their followers with them. You'll lose a big chunk of your audience if you rely entirely on RSS to publish. After leaving Twitter, my RSS readership doesn't seem to have grown. AFAICT it's the same as before.
- palidanx 4y agoSince the early pandemic, I've opted to e-mail 100 of my closest friends quarterly some really long form e-mails. It does take me quite a bit of time, maybe about 40 hours of writing and editing. What is interesting though, is when I see some of those friends after a long absence, they always would cite something I wrote from the newsletter of interest. I know there is quantity vs quality tradeoffs out there, but its nice to know some thought I wrote still sticks after several months.
- tester457 4y agoWhat topics do the newsletters cover?
- palidanx 4y agoA lot of is my personal perspective on events, either things like travel or circumstances that have occurred to me which I thought were interesting. Below is a sample of an older newsletter about dentistry, a neighbor, and a long hike to Vancouver Island. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yerJQ3gLjUcahxyznkPHtwRQ3qgo5niu9KBOIIcusrQ/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yerJQ3gLjUcahxyznkPHtwRQ... I've been debating perhaps writing more of a public blog, but we'll see.
- paulpauper 4y agoIsn't this what substack is? Substack writers making huge money. Even non-famous people getting hundreds of paying subs.
- Apocryphon 4y agoYeah, it's weird that this article doesn't mention Medium or Substack which, for all of their faults, are just Web 2.0 monetization-ready equivalents to the Web 1.0 sites it mentions (their list also misses Xanga and LiveJournal, a real oversight). And Tumblr for popular microblogging that's not Twitter.
- Lyngbakr 4y agoBut does monetization affect the content of blogs? I must admit that I really enjoyed the flavour of old school blogs where a person would just put some interesting ideas out there without ads, pop-ups asking for subscriptions, or product pushing. They'd built something cool or learned something new and wanted to share. They were excited about it, which translated into interesting reading even if the subject was really quite niche.
- ghaff 4y agoI'm sure it does. For starters, it means that your newsletter probably has to come out on a consistent cadence. It probably also has to be fairly narrowly focused. Nothing wrong with wanting to monetize--though the sort of success mentioned upthread is almost certainly an outlier--but you're going to need to pick a topic area, have a marketing strategy, etc.
- karaterobot 4y ago> The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms. By "personal" they probably mean that you control the platform. That would imply a self-hosted blog. To be honest, it's not really clear what they mean when they say personal (they use it in a few different ways in the article, but never give a definition) so that could be wrong. But, if the above is true, then that rules out Substack.
- dimmke 4y agoSomething I hate about stuff like this is people who work for media publications assume everybody else on the internet is like them. It reminds me of the Gawker days. They're all blue checkmark types and assume the world's discourse, the true "zeitgeist" is on Twitter. It's incredibly myopic. Now that Twitter is crumbling, they're looking for something else, which is fine. But I wish they'd have the self awareness to acknowledge that Twitter never truly was what they thought it was. All social media networks have a niche. Twitter's appeal was to journalists/'mediarati' and people who want to be (or are) important in some way. It wasn't this ubiquitous thing that EVERYBODY used. Some of us got off Twitter like 7 years ago and have been blogging ever since.
- mr90210 4y agoYour words tasted like coffee. Very well put!!!
- rpgbr 4y agoIt's been a while that nobody in media thinks “everybody” is on Twitter. What I hear and witness (being myself part of the media) is that the most powerful, influential people use Twitter, which is… kinda true? As a major evidence, let's remember when the US spent four years being led by a Twitter addicted, decisions made on Twitter. I hope Musk's disaster put an end on this, though.
- childintime 4y agoI'd say it far too hard to bring up a personal site. Why are there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts including a custom domain for $20/yr? Why doesn't the domain registration entitle you to a single static 100kB page, and/or a redirect to some shared my-site.on.domain.com? Instead there is brittle configuration and/or having to contract a third party. Come to think of it, what has ICANN been doing with their monopoly? Where is all that (10 figure?) money going to? I don't mind a tax, in fact open source infrastructure would benefit greatly from (tax-financed) bounties, but I see nothing being offered in return. Who's drinking from this neverending firehose?
- natebc 4y agoRe: ICANN https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/financials-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/financials-... They do publish financial reports. They also publish some details about executive compensation. https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/remuneration-practices-fy23-01jul22-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/remuneration-pra... Granted ... I don't really know what we're getting for that. :D
- tech234a 4y agoYou can almost get this with CloudFlare. They have a domain registrar and free static HTML hosting that you can upload a ZIP file to or connect to Git. (Note: I’m not a CloudFlare employee, but I do use the CloudFlare Pages HTML hosting service.)
- kwhitefoot 4y agoIf you can write HTML or have some sort of script that creates HTML from Markdown then you could use neocities.org
- dspillett 4y ago> Why are there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts including a custom domain for $20/yr? There are shared hosting providers around that price, including domain, that offer one-click WordPress installation, and WordPress-specific hosting options, so that exists in a slightly different form. Non-technical people know about WordPress a lot more than they know about markdown, and technical people would more likely want to self-manage such an arrangement, so I don't think there would be a large enough market to make that practical (the margins would be low, even accounting for the potential for lower resource use per client than WordPress by using something simpler, so you'd need to sell a lot of accounts to make it worth-while). > Why doesn't the domain registration entitle you to a single static 100kB page I don't think enough people would want it to make it a key differentiator against competing registrars, so the extra admin (particularly dealing with occasional copyright claims and other legal issues, and a DDoS attack against a client every now and then) would not be worth it. Registrars are essentially competing on price and inertia, and will do nothing extra unless it brings in extra money or makes them look enough better than the next registrar to the average user.
- PeterStuer 4y agoBlogs never went away. It was the audience that abandoned rss with a little 'lure them in then pull the plugg' from Google.
- fleddr 4y agoI personally started blogging in 2001 so I feel qualified to inject some opinions. Whilst the early blogging scene was cool, we should not glorify it too much. Even then it wasn't mainstream. Most people did not blog and the few that did were mostly unsuccessful. Centralization was a thing from the very start. "Blog rolls" would ultimately aggregate into a few winning bloggers, whilst the rest gets near-zero traction. Just like the influencer model of today. It seems codified into the internet, the extreme inequality of distribution of attention. So I frown upon terms like "golden ages". There was no golden age. It didn't really work well back then for most people and in today's radically different landscape even more odds are stacked against you. Discovery is even more of an issue than before, there's basically no mainstream platform/app to discover blogs. Not even Google Search delivers. That puts blogging into the enthusiast sphere, same as it always was. Due to saturation and dumbed down mobile phones/apps, engagement will be underwhelming and razor thin. There will be little engagement and most of it will be shallow. If not toxic. The one thing I do remember as vastly better were comments/conversations. People were far more relaxed, reasonable, open-minded, less polarized. Having a comment section on almost every site was common, not so much anymore. Similarly, the changed landscape of extreme polarization online means you have to weigh your words very carefully. Best to blog about something extremely boring/neutral. None of this suggests that you shouldn't blog. I'm just saying there will be no blogging revival as it never was a mainstream tool and in a world with the masses now online, even less so. "Twitter threads just don’t do the trick — and neither will Elon’s alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block)." Not getting this self-own. You block a person forever for the single act of posting long form content, which likely will be visually presented in a truncated way? And one writes this in an article making the case for the return of blogs?
- hammyhavoc 4y agoPre-2001, we had webrings, and thus people got plenty of traffic; anyone becoming successful meant others became successful. That's the golden age people refer to. In terms of reasonable conversations, prior to the internet going truly mainstream and people wandering around with access to the internet 24/7, most relatively niche sites that had interactive elements ended up attracting very specific demographics, of which you would likely have plenty in common with. The stats on Tumblr, and number of sites running on top of WordPress begs to differ in regards to blogging not seeing a revival. This doesn't even take into consideration Tumblr adding ActivityPub, nor WordPress being able to add it with a simple plugin.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoI have a writing blog of sorts [1], but nobody knows it exists. Nobody sees my posts except when I share the links to directly via other social media. Most of my posts can’t be found on google at all, even doing searches by name of the article (a few will turn up). It’s nice to have a blog but it’s really more of a diary unless you have readers. At least with substack, I get a handful here or there from the substack ecosystem, vs my custom website which got almost nothing at all and is now inactive because of that [1] https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/ https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/
- rchaud 4y agoBlogging/Authoring functionality needs to be built into the browser, as per the original vision for hypertext transfer. Browsers becoming read-only reduced web authoring to those that had the time and the means to learn HTML. Of course by 2005 blog software was common, so blogging was available to anyone who was computer literate. 18 years on, we are at another inflexion point now. At least a billion more people have been onboarded to the internet since 2005, and their first device was a smartphone. Computer literacy works entirely differently between the generation that grew up with mice and keyboards, and those that grew up with the peripheral-free UI of touch OSes. We could look under the hood of our computers, and often had no other choice. Smartphones on the other hand are so locked down, people can't even access a developer console on a browser.
- e61133e3 4y agoI love personal blogs.. if you have one, please share it!
- durmonski 4y agoGreat piece